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Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

thewalrus.ca

401–410 of 518 posts

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, deflation is awful. Imagine our continuously increased production and efficiency resulting in goods becoming cheaper and the value of the working person’s dollar going farther. Horrifying.

There will not be many working people if the economy is deflationary. Please read a macro book so you at least understand what you're arguing against before spouting nonsense.

> There will not be many working people if the economy is deflationary.

The us had deflation between 1860 and 1910. I guess at the end of fifty years of that we had, like, no laborers, or something.

Please read a history book before provably wrong macro dogma rots your brain and all you do is spout nonsense that could actually harm people.

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert, I just have the impression that the field of economics professionally is basically a lost cause, at least until generational turn-over if even that. Anything interesting has to engage with real facts like energy consumption, pollution, harvesting of raw materials, and somehow acknowledge the huge portion of human activities that are not measured in money. I don't know of anyone within economics who rea…

Yanis Varoufakis sounds interesting. Will check him out, thanks. Doesn’t align with my sensibilities at all/am generally allergic to anything described as Marxist, but the way you describe him and the misconceptions sounds worth looking into/I should challenge myself. I view Marx as more of a social analyst and a historian rather than an economist/a lot of what I understand of what he advocated for economically seems…

Some short perspectives, if simplistic:

Marx was basically just inspired by French Revolution idea of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and dismayed that it didn't work out. He came to some real insights about why capitalism doesn't achieve that vision. He changed his views over time and wrote strongly about cases where he was wrong. He didn't want anyone to idolize him in some static way or be "Marxist". He actually wasn't prescriptive, he didn't say what to do or how to structure a socialist society. He mostly diagnosed problem patterns in capitalism without proposing what the alternatives should be. Or so I've heard, none of this is my original insights or understanding.

Of people who are "Marxists" by self-description, some have been dangerous and destructive, but there are various versions and they often abhor each other. The worst of them are just as self-righteous as the worst of the Austrians.

FWIW, I think the Austrian models almost all have some truth in them. The problem is how they treat them as complete and dogmatic. They think they have it all figured out, and so they just take any situation and insist that their simplistic models are all there is to it. As a snarky critique, I think the Austrians just believe Wikipedia doesn't exist — or maybe they think it exists precisely because of the lack of government intrusion or something. They just have no insight, no model, no perspective of value on how it is that Wikipedia does exist. They are more interested in their models than in human beings (well, to be fair, I think that's similar for mainstream economists too).

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#404
post #57

When it starts to get really burdensome to keep your promises, the idea of breaking them gets really attractive. But that doesn't come for free. It costs credibility. The cost of central banks breaking their inflation-control commitment when inflation starts running hot, is that the market starts pricing in their unwillingness to raise interest rates. This fuels a whole bunch of other inflation feedback loops, and th…

Markets can’t price in anything somebody else isn’t willing to pay.

Everybody wants a million dollars an hour. The secret to inflation is understanding why you don’t get a million dollars per hour and why a firm doesn’t get a million dollars per car.

Call it the disappointment theory of inflation. Prices remain stable only when everybody is scared they won’t get anything if they ask for more money.

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#406

The walrus being a far-left MMT proposing place wrote this when inflation was at 3.5% or so. It's now much higher and very evidently out of control. The article quotes Mark Carney, as if he were on their side. BoE under Carney have raised interest rates twice: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/interest-rate and that hasn't even dented inflation. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/inflation-cpi I be…

"It's now much higher and very evidently out of control."

Only to those that fixate on changing prices as though they should never happen and are a mortal sin.

In reality price is just the market allocating scarce resources to those who can make better use of them.

There's no magic here. We're making less stuff because people have thrown sand in the works due to bureaucratic government restrictions. So who gets to lose out?

We can do it by price, or we can do it by quantity. Pick one.

The "inflation out of control" rhetoric is just PR cover for throwing a lot of people out of work, but trying to get the central bank to do the dirty work, rather than the more awkward job of raising taxes and/or cutting government spending.

Which, funnily enough, is precisely what MMT says on the subject.

"Inflation is the process whereby the government causes higher prices by creating more money either directly through deficit spending, or indirectly by lowering interest rates or otherwise encouraging borrowing. For example, when a shortage of goods and services causes higher prices, a government may attempt to help its constituents to buy more by giving them more money. Of course, a shortage means that the desired products don't exist. More money just raises the price. When that, in turn, causes the government to further increase the money available, an inflationary spiral has been created The institutionalisation of this process is called indexing"

Soft Currency Economics, Warren Mosler, p71

When you start critiquing MMT, always best to understand the source material first, rather then getting your view from Twitter et al. They don't understand what MMT is saying either.

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will not be many working people if the economy is deflationary. Please read a macro book so you at least understand what you're arguing against before spouting nonsense.

Japan says its economy has been in deflation since the 90s.[1] Everybody is working. Sure, the numbers aren't going up and there aren't constant booms of new companies being valued at 100 billion and exploding (which draws ire from economists and billionaire investors), but quality of life has been consistently high for normal people. Homelessness is barely present and people who want a job can find one quickly. If t…

The article you cited is from 2002. Japan has been mildly inflationary on average since the late 2000s. Unemployment spiked significantly during the deflationary period and has been dropping since.[1] You can see a similar pattern in the US deflationary periods during the 1800s. Every instance of deflation coincides with recessions or depressions and large scale job loss.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/unemployment...

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#408
post #57

When it starts to get really burdensome to keep your promises, the idea of breaking them gets really attractive. But that doesn't come for free. It costs credibility. The cost of central banks breaking their inflation-control commitment when inflation starts running hot, is that the market starts pricing in their unwillingness to raise interest rates. This fuels a whole bunch of other inflation feedback loops, and th…

> The cost of central banks breaking their inflation-control commitment when inflation starts running hot, is that the market starts pricing in their unwillingness to raise interest rates. I'm pretty sure that's been priced in for quite a while now, really. Interest rates have rarely gone up by much over the last 30 or so years, and for most of the last 20 they've been as close to 0 as they can go and still be called…

Strongly agree with this take. The money flows to the banks and then flows into investments. The capitalist class has grown obscenely wealthy while the rest of society has stagnated.

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found Simon Kuznets multi-volume piece on economics (including cycles) really interesting ~35 years ago. Many U.S. university libraries have a copy if/when You want to peruse it - it greatly expanded my thinking about those systems regardless if I am a "True Believer" or not. Those volumes can be pretty challenging at times, but extremely in-depth. Fascinating intro to cyclic theories of economics for a person who…

Thanks for the reading recommendations, looks like a solid set of material. Do you know where I could find copies of the periodicals? Looks like there are some scattered hard copies on ebay, but the web archive mentioned here is down: https://rs.resalliance.org/2009/02/03/whole-earth-web-archiv...

Nearly every library has CoEvolution Quarterly (CEQ)/Whole Earth Review (WER). It could be filed under either or both names. Same periodical, same people. Founded by Stewart Brand.

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reading recommendations, looks like a solid set of material. Do you know where I could find copies of the periodicals? Looks like there are some scattered hard copies on ebay, but the web archive mentioned here is down: https://rs.resalliance.org/2009/02/03/whole-earth-web-archiv...

Nearly every library has CoEvolution Quarterly (CEQ)/Whole Earth Review (WER). It could be filed under either or both names. Same periodical, same people. Founded by Stewart Brand.

* ...every sizable, North American, library... (That I have found)
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